30 slips-evidence that Jackson is home to some of the country's most vocal advo- cates of killing abortion doctors. But Hill wasn't fazed. Her for-profit company, the National Women's Health Organi- zation, operates nine clinics nationwide, so she was familiar with pro-life blockades, and even the occasional arson attempt. And in this season of Republican ascen- dancy she has, she feels, a handy insur- ance policy: a five-by-seven photograph on her desk that shows her and two other women being embraced by an ebullient Newt Gingrich. She also has a story to add to what we already know of Gingrich's unconventional family. Hill wants to tell about how Newt had his daughter, Kathy, call her up for a job. " T HE story begins in April, 1989, when I went to Washington to participate in one of those big, half- million-strong pro-choice marches," Hill said recently. 'Mary Farmer and Ann Rose, two of my consultants, went along with me." The day after the Sunday-afternoon march, the three women made their usual Capitol Hill rounds, giving encouragement to pro- choice legislators. Then they decided to "go annoy the hell" out of the leading anti-abortion congressmen, and their first choice was Gingrich. Hill, Farmer, and Rose, dressed as the successful busi- nesswomen they are, introduced them- selves as concerned constituents. 'We just told him how happy we were to meet him," Hill said. "Ann pulled a camera out of her purse, and we asked if we could have a picture with him. Newt was flattered. He said 'Sure,' and began running his hand over his hair and hitching his pants up." While a staff member positioned the women for the picture and Gingrich got ready to pose with them, he asked Hill what her busi- ness was at the Capitol. Hill told him to wait until the picture was taken. "And then I looked Newt right in the eye, gave him my best Southern smile, and batted my eyelashes at him," Hill said. "I told him, 'Why, Newt, didn't you see us out on the street yesterday? We are the abortion ladies.' " Gingrich was taken aback, but he kept on smiling, and invited the women to sit for a few minutes and chat. 'We took advantage of the time he gave us to tell him all the problems we were having in our Columbus, Georgia,. abor- tion clinic in particular and with our other clinics in general," Hill said. "Be- fore we left, he asked us for our business cards." One of those cards read, "N a- tional Women's Health Organization- Raleigh, N.C.," and when Gingrich saw it he said that his daughter was moving to North Carolina and maybe he'd have her give Hill a call for a job. Hill thought this was a joke. Her mother, a rock-ribbed Republican who answers phones for the Raleigh clinic, similarly thought a prank was being played on her when, two weeks later, someone phoned and said she was Newt Gingrich's daughter, calling about a job. Hill took the phone, and realized that the person on the other end was, indeed, Kathy Gingrich Lubbers-then twenty- six years old-calling from Atlanta. She said that she had always been Interested in working in women's health, and that her father had recommended that she get in touch. Hill took the matter seri- ously ("Hey, who wouldn't want to have Newt Gingrich's daughter working for your abortion clinic?" she says), and on May 5, 1989, Lubbers turned up and spent the morning with Mary Farmer and Ann Rose, touring an Atlanta inner- city women's clinic, and then, over lunch, discussed various job opportunities. N OTHING came of the talks, though, because Lubbers was about to move to Greensboro, North Carolina, which was not close enough to any of the clinics. But in 1992 she did declare herself a member of Republicans for Choice, and lobbied to remove the anti- abortion plank in the G.O.P. platform that her father had strongly supported. (She now runs a gourmet-coffee busi- ness.) Gingrich, though he has not re- turned calls on the subject, has said pub- licly that he respects his daughter's per- sonal opinions. In May, 1994, however, fourteen months after an abortion doctor was gunned down outside a Fl.orida clinic, he voted against the clinic-protection bill, which was designed to guard the lives of clients-and employees-of the country's abortion facilities. The bill passed anyway, but the killings continue. "That's why I keep the photo here on my desk," Susan Hill said. "If any of these right-wing crazies manage to break in and get past our metal detector, I can still hold up the picture of me with Newt, like a cross before a vampire." A BURN5 BROTHER GOE5 WE5T $"- /- ,- """ ;;;;- I {. \ . \ '" '\ .:- \ \ - .. ,t ..: ......'\ ,. / - . ,... \Þ - , \\ \ . \ KEN BURNS RIC BURNS R c BURNS has shown just twenty minutes of his four-part docu- mentary "The W ay West," which will be broadcast on PBS on May 8th and 9th, to his older brother, the documen- tary filmmaker Ken Burns. "I saw ex- actly as much of 'Baseball' before it was done as he's seen of this," Ric said the other day in his office, on the Upper West Side. 'We give each other space on our projects now and also maintain a respectful distance." Distance is not what you'd expect from two brothers in their early forties who shared a bunk bed as chlldren and whose films, like their goofy, early- Beatles hairdos, are so stylisticallv simi- 1ar as to be indistinguishable. In Ric's "The Way West," as in Ken's "The Civil War," the camera pans around tawny daguerreotypes, giving them the feel of motion pictures. You've got your melan- cholic background music-those sad banjos and plaintive fiddles which make Burns films sound like episodes of "A Prairie Home Companion." And, of course, you've got your wizened old nar- rator grumbling throughout; in "The Way West," it's the columnist Russell Baker, who sounds like 'The Civil War"'s David McCullough with a head cold. The distance Ric refers to may actu- ally have arisen out of Ken's benevo- lence. Ric was studying for his Ph.D. in English at Columbia, in 1985, when he became disenchanted and withdrew. Ken, who was just beginning work on "The Civil War," offered him a full-time job as a producer and writer on the project. Despite his title, Ric still saw himself as his brother's apprentice. "The first thing you learn as an apprentice is that you want to be the master," he said. "There was a lot of stressful but comic jockeying for position between the two of us-me constantly trying to push my way to the front and Ken just as ener- getically trying to keep his younger